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We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.
The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.
‘Next time you walk through a forest,’ she writes memorably in an essay called ‘Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom’, ‘look down. A city lies under your feet.’8
I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees.
Nature, too, seems increasingly better understood in fungal terms: not as a single gleaming snow-peak or tumbling river in which we might find redemption, nor as a diorama that we deplore or adore from a distance – but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily part.
Only one of these recent coinages resonates with me: ‘species loneliness’, for the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it.
What did the mountaineer-mystic W. H. Murray say after being released from years spent in German and Italian POW camps? Find beauty, be still.
People are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature: something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love, a quality … which they can do their best to honour. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken. The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture is the beginning of collaboration, among people but beyond us, in building our next home.27
